Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature

This rich analysis by Emory University English professor Sinykin (American Literature and the Long Downturn) traces how corporate consolidation has affected the book publishing industry. He suggests that the post-WWII rise in college graduates and inexpensive mass market books made the 1950s and ’60s boom times for book publishing’s bottom line, sparking interest from large corporations in buying up the “small and privately held” publishers—Random House, for instance, became in 1959 “the first major house to go public and used the influx of cash to acquire Knopf in 1960” before both were purchased by RCA in 1965. A downturn in book sales in the late ’70s led publishing’s new corporate owners to prioritize cheaply produced genre fiction titles by brand-name authors to secure returns on their investment. Sinykin sometimes succumbs to academic jargon (“One version of the epiphenomenal author is the romantic author’s obverse”), but his insights into how the corporatization of publishing has contributed to some of its most persistent flaws are revelatory: For instance, he suggests that requiring editors to justify prospective acquisitions by comparing them to “similar titles that had sold well” created a feedback loop in which editors passed on books by authors of color because there weren’t many titles to compare them to. Book lovers curious about how the proverbial sausage gets made will want to check this out. (Oct.)